Death by Pride: A Kyle Callahan Mystery

by Mark McNease

  Kyle looked around, taking in each detail. The paintings, the fireplace, the soft suede furniture. There were a number of photographs lined up on the fireplace mantel. Kyle wandered over and looked at them. He had the strange sensation no one in the pictures was related to Diedrich Keller. “Family?” he asked.

  “Distant,” said D. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  Linda eased down onto the couch. D could see she was still wearing the gun holster. His smile fell an inch or two. He remained standing as Kyle took a seat in the matching chair, forming a small triangle with Linda on one side, Kyle on the other, and Diedrich Keller standing by the coffee table.

  “Now,” D said. “May I get you something to drink?”

  Danny could hear movement upstairs. The floorboards in the townhouse were old and original, and they’d warped over the years as old wood does. The constant shifting of cold to hot, damp to dry with the changing seasons, created curves in the boards. No matter how well they were kept up, they always creaked. He heard voices, too, but muffled. He recognized the timbre of Kyle’s voice, speaking in short sentences. It elevated his agitation to a nearly unbearable level. Would Keller kill them, too? Would they all be found dead in this basement days from now, or be buried under the floor?

  He tried to free his hands. His arms had been fastened with straps to the metal bars along the side of the gurney. His legs were bound with a belt and strapped down. There appeared to be no way to free himself, but he kept trying, wriggling his right hand back and forth. He told himself over and over to relax, just relax. He’d always been fascinated by escape artists, and he knew the key to extricating oneself from restraints was not to fight against them, but to surrender to them. Deep breaths. Let the body become fluid. Finally, after a full five minutes of letting himself become smaller and smaller, his right hand came free. At first he didn’t realize it, but he felt the space that had opened up around his wrist, just enough empty space to allow him to slide his arm up and out. He raised his hand and stared at it, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then he quickly grabbed the tape on his mouth, yanked it off and screamed.

  Kyle and Linda both declined D’s offer of a drink. They did not want to waste time while he made coffee or tea, and they certainly were not having alcohol in the middle of the afternoon. When he’d made the offer, Linda glanced at Kyle with the very slightest shake of her head: no. Kyle read into it everything Linda wanted him to. Keller was stalling. Keller was up to something. Whatever he offered someone to drink in this house, it was a drink they regretted.

  “We visited your store again,” Kyle said.

  “Yes, I know,” D said. “Jarrod called me. He was afraid I might be in some danger.”

  “Danger?” said Linda.

  “With this Pride Killer person on the loose, and apparently some connection to my store I’m completely unaware of. I realized after speaking with Jarrod that I had seen that young man, looking in the store window. He never came in, though. Do you suppose this killer is stalking his victims? Perhaps he followed the man, approached him outside my business, and that’s where the trail went cold, so to speak.”

  “I think you know more than you’re telling us,” Kyle said. “I think it’s time for us to go to the police and suggest they have a conversation with you.”

  D stared at them. “I have to ask you to leave now.” His voice was cold, his smile gone and replaced by a flat, hard expression.

  That was when they heard it: a loud scream from beneath them. A man shouting, “Help me! Help me!” And that man, Kyle instantly recognized, was Danny.

  “Oh my God, he’s here!” Kyle shouted. He jumped up from the couch. “Where is he?”

  Without waiting for Keller to respond, Kyle hurried through the house, looking for doors, calling out, “We’re here, Danny! We’re here!”

  Keller was alone in the living room now with Linda. Just as she rose from the couch he lunged at her, shoving her back into the cushions. She was a tall woman, but Diedrich Keller was taller, and stronger. He shoved his forearm against her throat. When she reached up with both hands to free herself, gasping, he grabbed her gun from its holster. Stepping back from the couch, he pointed the pistol directly at Linda’s chest and said, “Stop right there.”

  Danny had not been successful in freeing his other arm. He’d also stopped relaxing, fighting frantically against his restraints. He heard the door open and footsteps rushing down the stairs. He looked up, shocked and relieved, to see Kyle running into the room.

  Kyle hurried over to him. He didn’t know what was going on upstairs, but he knew they had little time. He had to free Danny from the gurney. He stood over Danny, trying to determine where the buckles were on the straps.

  “The knife,” Danny said, nodding at the tray where Keller had his instruments of pain and pleasure. “Use the knife.”

  Kyle grabbed the X-Acto knife, turned back to the gurney and began slicing the straps. The knife wasn’t meant to cut leather, but Kyle was determined. He cut himself slashing at the straps and a gush of blood began flowing from his fingers. He didn’t care. He kept cutting, furiously digging with the knife blade. Finally the strap gave way and Danny was free. He slid off the gurney. He wanted to embrace Kyle, to fall into him, but there was no time. They were both about to run back upstairs when they heard the voice behind them.

  “Let’s all just stay in the basement, shall we?” D said.

  Kyle turned around and saw Linda in front of Diedrich Keller, who was holding her gun, calmly and evenly, prepared to shoot her in the back.

  “It will be so much easier to clean things up down here.”

  Kyle and Danny watched in horror as Keller raised the gun back over his shoulder. In a quick, savage arc, he brought the gun butt smashing against Linda Sikorsky’s skull. She collapsed in an instant, as if she’d been inflated and all the air inside her suddenly released.

  Kyle ran to her, fearful of the worst.

  “I doubt she’s dead,” D said. “Probably just unconscious. She’s in for quite a surprise when she wakes up again.”

  Timing was everything, Kyle knew. Decisions had to be made so quickly sometimes they could not be called decisions, but reactions, instincts. He was in a crouch over Linda. He still had the knife in his hand, and without thinking, without knowing what would happened next, he threw himself at Keller and thrust the knife into his leg.

  Keller screamed. Kyle pulled the knife out and plunged it in again, causing Keller to collapse on the floor beside Linda.

  Kyle scrambled for the gun. They two men struggled—Diedrich Keller was not giving up without a fight. Danny watched, terrified, as his husband and the man who had been close to killing them all rolled and wrestled on the floor. What could he do? Should he jump in and try to subdue Keller? Then he saw it: Keller had gotten the knife and was raising it over Kyle’s back. He was going to bury it in Kyle’s neck! Danny screamed, “Nooooo!”

  Then a gunshot. One single, roaring gunshot. Danny feared the worst. It had come to this. Kyle and Linda’s obsession with criminals, their repeated forays into the worlds of the depraved. His very worst nightmare had just become reality. He had to do something. He had to survive and do what he could to help them all. He turned to the instrument tray and grabbed a small, stainless steel hammer. With enough force it could be lethal. He turned back and the sight stunned him. Kyle standing up. Kyle rising slowly. First to his knees, then to his feet. Linda Sikorsky’s gun was in his hand. Diedrich Keller was dead.

  Kyle had never fired a gun in his life. He’d never held a gun. And yet, here he was in the basement of a townhouse owned by one of the most vicious and elusive serial killers New York City had ever seen. That killer was dead, and Kyle had killed him.

  Linda stirred, moaning on the floor.

  “She’s alive,” Danny said.

  “He’s not,” said Kyle, looking into the open, lifeless eyes of Diedrich Keller. And then he said, simply, “Call the police.”

  CHA
PTER Forty

  Kyle wished it had been a dream. He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, afraid to look at the digital clock by the television. A muted sitcom re-run played on one of a hundred channels, the light from the screen flickering into the room. Danny was asleep beside him. Or at least he was pretending to be. Kyle stayed silent, not wanting to know if Danny, too, was wide awake on his side, reliving the last moments of the night before.

  Kyle was consumed with guilt. Not for killing Diedrich Keller—lives had been saved by that gunshot, immeasurable pain had been spared his victims and his victims’ families. But guilt for chasing killers in the first place. It had become a pastime for him, a way of amusing himself. Bo Sweetzer at Pride Lodge, Kieran Stipling from the Katherine Pride Gallery, Charlotte Gaines at CrossCreek Farm, and now the deadliest of them all, Diedrich Kristof Keller III. Dead by Kyle’s own hand in an air-conditioned basement.

  He’d thought the interrogations would never end. He, Linda and Danny spent most of the night at the police station giving statements, reliving what had happened, and answering over and over why they had not gone to the police with their suspicions. What was he supposed to tell them? That it was too much fun chasing killers on their own? That was the real answer, the answer that shocked him, like realizing something about ourselves we would never tell anyone and had not wanted to know.

  It had to stop. Now was as good a time as any, too. So many things were about to change. So many shifts and rearrangements in life. Now was his chance to turn away from the dark side, to just be a personal assistant, amateur photographer, friend and husband. To live a normal life. Could he do it? Would he do it?

  The answer is what had him awake at 3:00 a.m., blinking in the darkness.

  The answer was no.

  Epilogue

  July came and went without the kind of heat Kyle was accustomed to in New York’s summer months. On the whole it was shaping up to be one of the coolest summers they’d had in a decade. He was fine with that; the heat, stench and humidity of Manhattan between June and September were usually overwhelming. But not this year. This year had been different in so many ways.

  He had killed a man. He’d pursued murderers before, but never had it come to this: struggling with someone who was determined to end his life in a feverish bid to save his own, wresting Linda’s gun away, and then … without thinking about it, without even intending it, shooting Diedrich Keller in the heart. He didn’t know he’d shot him in the heart until later, when an autopsy was performed. But he knew immediately Keller was dead, and he knew he had killed him when he lifted himself up from the floor, with Danny behind him and Linda just beginning to regain consciousness. It was a scene he would relive in his mind for years to come, perhaps for all the years he had left on the planet.

  It was now August. The Pride parade had snaked down Fifth Avenue over a month ago and displayed its explosion of color without them. Linda would simply have to visit again, or find another parade to go to, although Kyle suspected she never would. For her, too, the memory of what happened had quickly become a stain. There was no way any of them was going to a parade after the events of that Thursday in the basement of an Upper East Side townhouse. By Friday morning everyone knew the Pride Killer was dead. The police knew. The media knew—including Kyle’s boss Imogene, who for once in her life had the good sense not to press him for an exclusive interview. At least not until the following week. He turned her down.

  The three of them gave exhaustive statements. The detectives they met took a very dim view of them pursuing a serial killer on their own. There was also the issue of Linda’s firearm. New York City was famous for its gun laws and the whole thing had left them in a gray area. Kyle was the one doing the shooting. Kyle was not licensed to have, hold, shoot, or own a gun. But Kyle had somehow gotten the gun from Keller and ended the career of a killer who had confounded the NYPD for seven years. At the mayor’s prodding, any idea of charges concerning the weapon were dropped. Kyle was hailed as a hero, a position he never sought or wanted to hold. It had made for a stressful, dreadful weekend, with the time they had to spend with Linda its only saving grace.

  Linda Sikorsky had no problem with a dead serial killer. She also did not envy Kyle’s sudden fame as the man who stopped the Pride Killer—a claim he would never make anyway. She had encountered many terrible things in her years as a cop and was able to put most of her feelings aside, down where she kept the fear she’d known on the job, the doubt, and the sorrow of having told so many people their loved ones were dead. She also had bigger concerns. Her wife was waiting for her in Phoenix with her dying mother-in-law. Life did not stop because a madman died quickly and deservedly in a New York City basement.

  The three of them spent the rest of that weekend going around the city. They shopped, they sight-saw, they even went to a Broadway show for Saturday matinee. None of it made them forget what had happened, but it helped. Nothing could be changed, but Linda’s time with them was limited and they spent it having as much enjoyment as they could. Then, early Monday, they said goodbye on the curb outside their apartment building as Linda got into a taxi and headed to the airport. Nothing would ever be quite the same.

  In the six weeks since, parts of their world had shifted dramatically. Margaret Bowman had her going-away party, and it was a huge success. Also a very tearful one, as guest after guest toasted the old woman and offered anecdotes about what Margaret’s Passion meant to them—a first date, a wedding anniversary, the signing of a contract to star in a movie. Danny did not buy a new suit after all and doubted he would be suit-shopping anytime soon. He gave the last toast of the night.

  Two weeks later they got a call from Linda. She was still in Phoenix with Kirsten, making funeral arrangements. Dot McClellan had died the night before, quietly, as is usually the case with someone riddled with cancer and pumped full of opiates. All in all it had been a cool but very hard summer.

  Now Linda and Kirsten were back in their small house in rural New Jersey. Linda was back at her vintage-everything store. Kirsten was taking pottery classes and wondering what she wanted to do now that she’d sold her real estate business. One thing she knew: she never again wanted to stand in anyone’s living room but her own, selling a prospective buyer on the neighborhood and the schools. She wanted something new, something very different in her life. She had Linda, they had the house, and the future looked interesting since she, too, had spread her wings and taken a leap into the unknown.

  The four of them were talking, in very early conversation, about going on vacation together. A belated, delayed double honeymoon. They’d not decided where, but were hoping to finally arrange it the following spring. As they found themselves living again, laughing, letting the immediate past move further and further away, they thought a shared vacation might be just the thing to really give them distance from it all. In the meantime, Kyle had much to do—learning to be a landlord at the building they now owned, soothing his mother’s feelings over being bought out (she took the deal, knowing it was best for them all), and somehow becoming the man he had been before he ended Diedrich Keller’s life. He wasn’t sure that was possible, but he hoped. Death had come up to him, looked him in the eye, and walked away. It was time to live again.

  UP NEXT

  It’s been nine months since the Pride Killer’s final murderous spree ended in a townhouse basement on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Kyle Callahan put a stop to the murders and a stop to Diedrich Kristof Keller himself, with a bullet to the heart.

  Kyle had never killed a man before. The aftershocks are still with him, leading him into therapy as he tries to climb his way out from a spiral of despair. He realizes the one thing that can make him feel alive again, the one thing that can engage him with life, is to solve another murder—or try to.

  In ‘Kill Switch,’ Kyle takes on his first cold case. His friend Skate Copley’s daughter was murdered three years ago on a New York City street as she headed for dinner with her high school friends. The k
iller was never caught, escaping with his identity and Corinne’s smartphone. No trace, no usable description. Only the sound of her father on the phone pleading with her to “Speak to me, Baby, speak to me.” She never said another word and Kyle takes it upon himself to trace the echoes, find the missing pieces, and bring justice to a seventeen-year-old who seemingly died for nothing. But did she? Kyle, joined again by Detective Linda who worries he might be taking a dangerous road, is about to find out.

  And now for Chapter One …

  Kill Switch

  A Kyle Callahan Mystery

  Coming August, 2015

  CHAPTER One

  Kyle glanced around the therapist’s office. He’d sat in this overstuffed beige leather chair, talking to this wise and soft-spoken man for the past six months, and still there were small details he would notice on a visit that he hadn’t seen before. A photograph of Peter Benoit’s daughter, now in her second year at Princeton. A small, cheap statue of Chopin, Peter’s favorite composer, staring blindly from the bookshelf. And tonight: a set of bronzed baby shoes on Peter’s desk. Kyle never sat at or beside the desk. He only looked at it, tucked tightly into a corner of the room. It was as mysterious as his therapist—he only knew about the daughter and the love for Chopin by asking questions, a reversal of roles that had happened perhaps a half dozen times over the course of twenty-four one hour sessions spent talking about his life since the killing. Correction, the shooting, as Peter reminded him. Yes, Kyle Callahan had killed a man. Yes, it had been in self-defense. Yes, it had ended the nightmarish career of the Pride Killer, among New York City’s most successful and cruelest sociopaths. So, rightly, Peter Benoit (pronounced “Ben-wah”) reminded Kyle from time to time that it was not murder. But that didn’t change how Kyle felt. It didn’t erase his guilt, however unnecessary. He had taken a man’s life in an Eastside townhouse basement, and he had been trying to live with it ever since.